The Aachen Cathedral was declared in 1978 as the first German cultural monument in the world heritage list of the UNESCO.  The cathedral built around 790 to 800 is historically important building and artifact of universal importance and one of the largest examples of religious architecture.  As a miracle of the architecture - half mystical, half of human origins - the contemporaries explained the Pfalzkapelle of the GermanRoman of emperor Karl der Grosser.  The Pfalzkapelle, the first curved building north of the alps, is strongly coined-shaped by building traditions of classical antiquity and by Byzantine architecture.  It forms the core of the cathedral. Over an octagonal framework, side-by-side with ship-like lofts and finally with a dome; they stand out against their surroundings.  As well as, against the components clearly added later, under which the Gothic Choir is emphasized.  During a period of 600 years (936-1531) here 30 German kings were crowned.  The collections of the Aachener of cathedral treasure, show sacred cultural treasures, more spectacular, more Carolingian, more Ottonian and unique to their time.  They are works of art, as well as archaeological and historical documents of inestimable importance.
- Translation of the German UNESCO Site on the Aachener Dom.

 

Aachen today is a delightful small town in the North-Rhine-Westfalia region of western Germany. It was, and still is, much visited because of its associations with Karl der Grosser, aka Charles the Great (Charlemagne) and the Holy Roman Empire.  At Aachen, Charles' favourite residence in the latter part of his long reign (768-814), are preserved memorials   of the great man himself and of the empire he founded.  Visit and you feel the centripetal  power of a myth-history which has dominated European imaginations for well over a thousand years.

It all started, according to Einhard who was a member of the court during the Aachen years, because Charles loved swimming: there were thermal springs and old Roman baths at Aachen, and Charles 'swam whenever he could.' He would invite not only his sons to bathe with him but his magnates and friends, and sometimes his retinue as well. 'Sometimes a hundred men or more would be in the water together'.
 

Fig. 2 Aix-la-Chapelle at Aachen Cathedral.
Carolingian Anonymous (750-987)

Aachen was one of many estate-centres belonging to the new Carolingian dynasty which had seized power in the Frankish realm in 751.  Charles wintered there in the first year of his reign, 768-69, but is next recorded there again only in 789, at a realm-wide assembly to which he announced an extraordinary programme of collective, institutional and personal reform.  Though he stayed at Aachen increasingly often from 794, he resided there more or less permanently only after returning to Francia following his coronation in Rome on Christmas Day 800 as the first emperor of a 'renovated Roman Empire'.

Swimming was surely not the only reason for Charles' choice of Aachen.  That it was an old Roman site mattered both symbolically, through its imperial associations, and practically, as a stone quarry Equally, the baths assumed Christian significance as a site of symbolic cleansing and regeneration.  Most important of all was Aachen's centrality, in media Francia, the heart of the new empire.  Lying 30 km east of the Meuse and Maastricht and 65 km south-west of the Rhine and Cologne, Aachen was accessible: it was on a minor Roman road which joined, some 10 km northward, the very much bigger one linking Cologne and Maastricht.  Still in use in the early Middle Ages, this road was militarily crucial for Charles' Saxon campaigns in the years around 800.  A text written within a few years of Charles' death depicts Aachen thronged with crowds of litigants, visitors, beggars and telltale sign of an economic and political centre-whores.  Charles' choice of the site reveals a good deal about his regime.

Several decades of research by archaeologists and historians have shown how Aachen worked as Charles' capital, his `first seat in Francia'.  Here, in 801, he brought from Ravenna the statue of Theoderic, king of Italy (d. 527), greatest of earlier barbarian rulers.  Here was a hall, 160 ft. long and some 60 ft wide: it would have been the setting for the banquets described in court poetry, and the magnificent receptions of envoys.  Perhaps Charles displayed here that marvel of eastern technology, the water-clock that the Calif Harun al-Rashid sent him from Baghdad.  Here was a covered colonnade, along which stately processions could move, and an atrium, or large courtyard, where assemblies could gather out-doors.  ere were the houses of aristocrats, built, says Notker, the late ninth-century author of Charles' Deeds, just a bit lower than Charles' personal apartments in the palace, 'so that from his window, he could see everything they were doing without their realising it'.  Here was a market-place.  Here was a park-cum-zoo, where Charles' elephant, another gift from Baghdad, must have stood tall among sheep and goats.  While the palace itself was relatively weakly fortified, apparently, Aachen had walls.
 

Fig. 3  Aachen Cathedral. Main Entrance & Lower Levels.
Carolingian Anonymous (750-987)

All that has to be imaginatively reconstructed from excavations and texts. What we can still see is Charles' church.  It is almost exactly 1,200 years old.  The earliest reference to it comes in a letter written to Charles by the Anglo-Saxon scholar Alcuin in 798, after his 'retirement' from the post of scholar-in-residence at Aachen. Alcuin recalled discussing with 'a lady' at court 'the columns which have been erected in the most beautiful and wonderful building of the church which Your Wisdom commanded'. Though often misnamed a 'chapel', this was in fact a parish church, staffed by secular clerks, and serving a whole neighborhood community, not just the court. It was, and is, public, not private space.  Not being monastic, it was, and is, open to women.

Dedicated to the Virgin Mary, the church is 144 ft from one 'end' to the other; each section of the octagonal structure is 18 ft, making 144 ft in all; the height is 48 ft to the top of the side-walls with 12 ft more to the point where the roof joins the central lantern which is a further 48 ft high.  The 12 ft matrix comes straight from the description of the heavenly city in the Book of Revelations, chapter 21.  It's earthly models were the churches of St. Vitale at Ravenna and perhaps of SS Sergius and Bacchus, and even the Haghia Sophia, in Constantinople.  From these were copied the octagon, strong enough to support a dome, and the wide first-floor gallery, large enough to accommodate almost as many people again as the ground-floor space.  The marble columns, Corinthian capitals, classicising bronzework, antique statuary imported from Italy all attest a transfer of Romanity to the heart of  Francia.

Fig. 4  Chapel of Charlemagne.  Interior view.
Carolingian Anonymous (750-987)
 

The church at Aachen, for all its large capacity (according to a modern cleric there, it can hold 7,000 at a pinch), has an astonishing sense of intimacy.  Looking up from the central space, you see the dome-mosaic depicting the twenty-four elders of Revelations offering their crowns before Him who sits on the throne.  This is an image of hierarchy and of community.

Charles' throne, now, and probably in the eighth century too, placed on the west section of the first floor gallery, is approached, like Solomon's, by six steps.  In front of it in the gallery's bronze railing (which is original), a little gate opens to give a view directly across to the altar of the Saviour in the gallery's east side, and to the altar of the Virgin on the ground floor.  Thus the monarch, invisible to the congregation below, had direct closeness to God.

At the altar of the Saviour, after an assembly in the atrium, Charles in 813 crowned his son and heir, Louis the Pious, as his successor. Later in the Middle Ages, the would-be emperor was elected, crowned and enthroned at Aachen as king of Germany before going to Rome for coronation by the pope. In the words of the thirteenth-century Sachsenspiegel, the candidate became king when he 'uph den stul zu Aken kumt' ('comes onto his throne at Aachen').

Just beneath the entrance, under the church's west door, Charles was buried on the day he died, January 28th, 814.  The Roman marble sarcophagus in which his body was reputedly placed is preserved today in the church treasury.  A half-legendary account of the visit of Otto III to Charles' tomb in the year 1000 describes the hero 'seated. wearing a golden crown, and only the tip of his nose decayed' (Otto provided a golden replacement).

The German monarchy at its medieval height literally canonised Charles.  After Frederick Barbarossa's elevation of the body from its tomb in 1165, an occasion marked by the gift of the great copper and gilt candelabra by which the church is still lit, Frederick 11 in 1215 drove the last nail into the splendid golden shrine which has since housed Charles' remains.  Though Charles' sanctity remains unofficial because declared by a 'pope' of doubtful status, it was widely acknowledged in the later Middle Ages.  Rulers of both Germany and France lavished gifts on the Aachen church: Emperor Charles IV gave an impressive bust-reliquary; Louis XI of France gave a silver-gilt arm-reliquary in which were encased bone-fragments from Charles' right arm. Early modern monarchs thereafter, sporadically, continued the cult.

Aachen, then, long after it had lost political importance remained the ritual centre of the empire that traced its origin to Karl der Großer.  As the Aix-la-Chapelle of French vernacular song and story, it also retained huge significance for the French as the seat of `their' Charlemagne.  Revolutionary republicanism happily accommodated this myth: the French army that captured Aachen in 1794 seized a number of treasures, including Charles' sarcophagus, and took them back to Paris.

Fig. 6  Aachen Cathedral. Detail: Cathedral Window & Balcony.
Carolingian Anonymous (750-987)

For Napoleon, who declared, 'Je suds Charlemagne', Aix, now part of his empire, was a numinous place. He paid a state visit there in 1804, and, deeply moved, ordered the return of the stolen treasures, though the sarcophagus was brought back only in 1815 when Aix became Aachen again.

Nineteenth-century German rulers were among the keenest of Aachen's devotees. Frederick William IV of Prussia had Charles' shrine opened in 1843. Except for bits of the right arm, the bones were intact and it was possible to calculate the height of the living emperor: just over 6 ft, exactly as Einhard has described him.  There were further scientific' re-openings of the shrine in 1861, 1874, and finally 1906, when Kaiser Wilhelm II, who paid for the restorations of the ceiling mosaic and the church fabric, made a much-publicised visit to Aachen to signal the rise of yet another 'empire'.

 
There is no national and imperial posturing at Aachen now, but Charles the Great is not forgotten.  A contemporary poet called him 'father of Europe', and so he was in the sense that he created a cultural identity with Aachen its symbolic centre.  The little town with a big history retains its hold on late twentieth-century imaginations.  Although, possessiveness, happily, is a thing of the past: today American, Russian and Japanese visitors jostle with citizens of the new Europe inside the church that Charles built.